Social and economic development of underdeveloped & developing countries bringing about an equitable growth eradicating the poverty, hunger, malnutrition, illiteracy and providing the poor better livelihood options...

Dear Readers,Please Give Comments, Like and Send in Facebook, Subscribe this via RSS or E mail. Become a follower of this site through Google Friend Connect or Google reader or Blogger.... Feel free to email me at sadhubani@gmail.comfor anything...

The clinching argument in favour of land
titles to women is the stability and security it provides and the protection it
affords from marital violence

Women’s importance
in
agricultural production both as workers and as farm managers has been growing
in the last two decades, as more men move to non-farm jobs leading to an
increased feminization of agriculture. Today 48 percent of all male workers are
in agriculture as against 75 percent of all female workers, and this gap is
rising. Further, an estimated 20 percent of rural households are de facto
female headed, due to widowhood, desertion, or male out-migration. These women
are often managing land and livestock and providing subsistence to their family
with little male assistance. Hence agricultural productivity is increasingly
dependent on the ability of women to function effectively as farmers.

However ownership of land is concentrated mostly in male
hands in our patriarchal society. It has been estimated that in India,
landownership in favour of women is not more than 2 percent (Agarwal 1995).
Lack of entitlement to land (and other assets such as house, livestock, and so
on) is a severe impediment to efficiency in agriculture for women cultivators
because in the absence of title women cannot get credit or be entitled to
irrigation and other inputs, especially technology. Women’s working on land
without title has led to creation of a new form of Zamindari (landlordism), as their operation is
divorced from ownership. It may be recalled that Zamindari was abolished some
sixty years back on considerations of both efficiency and equity. The
discrepancy between the ownership and operation of land was regarded as one of
the basic maladies of agrarian structure that acted as a ‘built-in-depressor’.
It led to not only inefficient utilisation of given scarce resources but also stood
in the way of augmenting these resources. Thus in every state the policy of
abolishing all intermediary interests and giving ownership to the actual
operator on land was adopted soon after independence.
Time is ripe now to do so for women farmers too.

In addition to improved
production, the clinching argument in favour of land titles to women is the stability
and security it provides, the protection it affords from marital violence, and
the bargaining power it gives women in household decision making and in the
labour market for wages. However without title to land, women are not
recognized, even by the state, as clients for extension services or as
candidates for membership in institutions such as co-operative societies.